~ 1 ~ Raymond Craib Department of History Cornell University Dear agrarian studies readers, Many thanks for reading this. A little context should be helpful. This is a project I am just beginning and is designed to be a fairly brief book. It is a project that tries to contextualize historically and situate ideologically three of the more prominent libertarian ‘opt-out’ or ‘escape’ projects of the past 70 years or so. Part of the point of the work is to in fact question the degree to which such projects are ‘opt-out’ projects but, more concretely, the work also aims to situate the projects directly within the mainstream history of twentieth century capitalism, rather than letting them float at the margins as somewhat exceptional and strange things. Much of my interest is in the ideological project at work, rather than, say, the material question of tax evasion. I should note that part of my interest also is that the projects themselves are funky, very interesting, and offensive. Most of my work thus far has been focused on tracking down basic information on those involved and narrativing the stories. Thus, much of what you will find here is fairly descriptive. My analytical interventions are fairly limited in this piece at this point. For the book project, each of the three sections will be expanded in order to take up larger issues related to financial structures and instruments, changing political and economic contexts, and the like. Thanks in advance for critiques, comments, suggestions. RC Escape geographies and libertarian enclosures Once upon a time (in 1972), a wealthy man set out to establish his own sovereign city- state. He found a shallow reef over which the waters of a vast ocean had lapped gently since time immemorial. He hired a company to dredge the surrounding ocean floor and deposit the sand on the reef. Thus was a tiny island born, upon which the man had a stone platform built, a flag planted, and the birth of the Republic of Minerva declared. The monarch of a nearby island kingdom was not impressed. He opened the doors of his kingdom’s one jail and assembled an army. The monarch, his army and a four-piece brass band boarded the royal yacht and descended upon the reef where they promptly removed the flag, destroyed the platform, and deposed the man who would be king. And Minerva returned to the ocean. ~ 2 ~ Coin minted for the Republic of Minderva. Note the date (1973) and the inclusion of points of latitude and longitude. The story of Michael Oliver, his short-lived Republic of Minerva, and the response of the King of Tonga is not the stuff of fairy tales (although it does have a certain grim quality: in the process of deposing Oliver, one prisoner apparently murdered another, creating the strange circumstance in which a state’s murder rate exceeded the size of its population.)1 Nor is it an uncommon story. It is one example of many of efforts by modern market-libertarians to establish independent, sovereign enclaves in ocean, island, and coastal spaces. Such spaces have long been fodder for the imagination: Utopia, Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island, and Lord of the Flies (to name only a few) have all used remote islands as means to stage arguments about the market, exchange, politics and society. Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo found in the ocean refuge from the tyranny of continents; and Ayn Rand’s capitalist paradise, despite its location high in the Rocky Mountains, was named Atlantis. The Republic of Minerva is a real-life counterpart to such imaginings and only one of the myriad initiatives undertaken since the end of World War II by 1 See George Pendle, “New Foundlands,” Cabinet 18 (Summer 2005) and Anthony Van Fossen, Tax Havens and Sovereignty in the Pacific Islands (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2012). ~ 3 ~ an eclectic and powerful assortment of individuals who describe themselves as market- libertarians or anarcho-capitalists.2 Surprisingly enough, these are initiatives that have received limited attention from academics and intellectuals, despite the buzz they have generated on technology- and libertarian- oriented websites. If they have received academic attention it is largely as examples of tax havens gone awry or the problems with ‘offshore.’3 But generally such efforts have sat at the margins of intellectual and economic history. The schemes were too bizarre, the protagonists too eccentric, the plots too outrageous to be folded in to mainstream political, economic, and cultural histories. My contention is they are not: that is to say, there is plenty here that is bizarre, eccentric and outrageous but that hardly means it sits at the margins political and economic life. Just they opposite, perhaps. Such activities and fantasies are a central part of the history of twentieth-century capitalism and its reconfigurations in the wake of the global depression of 1929 and post-war decolonization. Indeed, other than perhaps the individual audaciousness of some plans and the vehement anti-statist rhetoric, at times one would be hard-pressed to distinguish between these initiatives and some of the informal colonial practices of states and capitalists in our contemporary era.4 And while new in some ways—for example, in the contemporary linkages between technology and market-libertarianism—in other ways they bear a striking resemblance to aspects of 19th-century filibustering and frontier expansion, whether it be William Walker in Central America or the proclaimers of the Bear Flag Republic in Alta California. Moreover, they have become, in the past two decades, surprisingly mainstream. Oliver’s 1968 New Constitution for a New Country (about which I will say more shortly) may have resided at the margins when first published but it reads like a fairly run-of-the-mill manifesto today. Rand, meanwhile, has been reborn as a subject of scholarly study rather than 2 For studies that take up the U.S. context, see Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009); Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (New York: Oxford UP, 2011); and Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (New York: Oxford UP, 2011). For a broader perspective, see Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States and the Rise of the New Imperialism (New York: Henry Holt, 2007). Anarcho-capitalism, as an ascription, has increasingly been avoided by many of its proponents. Instead they have opted for the language of market-libertarian or, more recently, ‘analytical anarchism.’ See, e.g., www.analyticalanarchism.net 3 For a study of Oliver in the context of the decolonization of Oceania, see Van Fossen, Tax Havens and Sovereignty, esp. chap. 3. 4 See Fred Pearce, The Land Grabbers: The New Fight Over Who Owns the Earth (Boston: Beacon, 2012); the recent special issues of the Journal of Peasant Studies (including 38: 2 (2011); 39: 1 (2012); and 39: 3-4 (2012)); Joel Wainwright, Geopiracy (London: PalgraveMcMillan, 2013) and Raymond Craib, “The Properties of Counterinsurgency,” in Dialogues in Human Geography (2014). More broadly, see Grandin, Empire’s Workshop. ~ 4 ~ scorn.5 Silicon Valley has inspired an entire generation of libertarian ‘radical social entrepreneurs’ whose prophet is Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, rather than Karl Marx, and whose vocabulary is more likely to include ‘start-up’ than ‘rise up.’6 This essay tracks out a number of efforts—related generally in their libertarian emphases but distinct in terms of form—to create libertarian places in purportedly non-state (or unstate) spaces. Such projects are not all cut from precisely the same cloth—they range across a spectrum of liberal thought—but they share a common disdain for the state, a commitment to free enterprise, a fetishization of the unencumbered entrepreneur, and a deep faith in the promise of technology. My aim is to situate these endeavors in a broader historical context of libertarian efforts to escape aspects of the state (rather than ‘the state’ per se.) In the process, I hope to have something to say about how such efforts are linked to a broader libertarian resurgence that melds a selective escape from the state with new forms of territorial enclosure in the form of land- and water-grabbing. There is a small body of work which has taken up some of these figures but largely as a means to address tax haven issues, criminality, and sovereignty and from a perspective largely culled from either political theory or international finance. In contrast, my work is intended to historicize these themes, to situate the main figures in a changing global context, and to make sense of the initiatives as more than mere efforts to escape forms of taxation. For example, there is as much political ecology as there is political economy at work here. In the era of the so-called anthropocene—a term popularized by atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen as a means to recognize an era in which humans directly impact geologic time (through dramatic climate change)—the vision of possibly escaping a collapsing planetary ecosystem has taken on new life. The Anthropocene has been taken up in recent years by a number of social scientists, including Dipesh Chakrabarty who sees in the crisis of global climate change a need for a new approach to history and contemporary theory.7 Chakrabarty’s assertion in part is that the crisis impacts us 5 For a trenchant recent critique, see Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind. 6 De Soto I doubt would refer to himself as a libertarian.